JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – National POW/MIA Recognition Day honors the more than 45,000 American service members who were prisoners of war in previous conflicts, and the more than 81,000 who are still missing in action.
One of the most recognizable symbols honoring those POW/MIA service members was inspired by an Orange Park woman whose husband was shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War and never returned home.
Mary Hoff sparked the idea for what is now the POW/MIA flag, which was raised Friday morning outside JFRD Fire Station 47 on Ethel Road on the city’s Northside, across from the Jacksonville National Cemetery.
The fire station became the first one in Jacksonville to have the POW/MIA flag fly on a pole outside of the station during Friday’s event, which was hosted by the Rotary Club of North Jacksonville and the JROTC from First Coast High School.
At the ceremony, the memories came flooding in for Suzanne Ogawa and Michael Hoff, the children of Mary Hoff and her husband, Michael.
“She had a servant’s heart,” Ogawa said of her mother. “[She] was really persistent in trying to get answers about our father and others, as well, who are missing.”
The answers Ogawa is talking about are questions she has about her father, who was living his dream as a United States Navy pilot at 34 years old when his plane was shot down over Laos during his very first mission in the Vietnam War on Jan. 7, 1970. He is still unaccounted for.
“Eyewitnesses would say that it turned into a roll,” Ogawa said about her father’s plane. “They did see a light that looked like an ejection, that he had ejected from the plane, but they did not see the parachute open. He was only a couple of thousand feet above the ground. Right after they saw that light, the plane impacted and exploded. They were not able to get to that area because they were so heavily fired upon. They could not get to the area quick enough to try to see.”
Ogawa wishes there had been more of an effort -- both then and since -- to recover her father’s remains.
“I get mad at our government,” she said. “I get angry. I want answers. My mother wanted answers. She was very peaceful about it, but it is like, just bring him home. Just bring him home. Don’t leave them behind.”
Mary got the vision for the POW/MIA flag because she wanted a symbol to represent families who were going through what hers was experiencing.
She read a newspaper article about a flag company named Annin Flag Company and reached out to representatives of the company to discuss her idea.
That conversation is what eventually led to artist Newt Heisley designing what is now the POW/MIA flag.
“You see it everywhere,” Mary’s son, Michael Hoff, said of the flag. “The fact that people still support the cause and care about the people who have been affected, that is what it is all about. That is what mom was trying to do.”
The iconic image was originally presented as a banner in 1971 and then adopted as a flag by the National League of POW/MIA families a year later.
Ogawa said her mother’s biggest direct input in the design was making it black and white, “to match the uniforms of the POWs.”
“She was a beautiful example of standing for other people and serving,” Ogawa said about her mother, who died in 2015 at the age of 84.
Heisley, the flag designer, was himself a World War II veteran. The silhouette featured on the flag is of Heisley’s son, who was also a military vet who had to return home and recover from hepatitis at the time his father started creating the banner.
The younger Michael Hoff said he wants people to keep a few things in mind whenever they see a POW/MIA flag.
“I hope they think about our current military as much as anything else because they are the ones that are the tip of the spear,” he said. “They are out there defending our way of life. I hope it helps people remember that there are people who are making sacrifices even today.”
Mary Hoff is buried at the Jacksonville National Cemetery with a POW/MIA banner next to her grave and her husband’s name on the other side of her headstone.
His remains are not there but Ogawa and her brother hope that will change one day.
“It is wrong. It is wrong,” Ogawa said of service members being left behind. “People who sign up to defend our country should be taken care of.”